


Sufferance

by ancestrallizard



Category: Shin Megami Tensei
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Bullying, Gen, super self indulgent crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 07:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13922490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancestrallizard/pseuds/ancestrallizard
Summary: Kazuya could accept that his daemon was different. The rest of the world, apparently, could not.





	Sufferance

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for bullying and such 
> 
> Few ground rules for daemons - if they're separated from their human both they and the human die, and to settle is when daemons permanently take one form that best matches their human's personality.

A few weeks after his 15th birthday, at the end of a regular doctor’s appointment, Kazuya’s mother asked his doctor if she should be concerned that her son’s daemon hadn’t begun to settle. Did he know why it still changed so much, despite Kazuya’s age? Her daemon, Charis, mirrored her worry from its perch on the arm of her chair, the mourning dove’s feathers ruffled in agitation. Kazuya watched on, unconcerned, bored of the drab examination room and thinking about games he wanted to play once he returned home.

“I understand your concern, but there’s really nothing to worry about.” He said, not looking away from the form he was filling out on his clipboard. “Daemons settle later and later these days, but the high school transition helps.” He finished whatever he’d written, and then gave it to his daemon, a Japanese macaque as grey haired as he was, to file away.

Kazuya’s daemon, Khayyam, was perched on his shoulder as a brown bat, and trembled near imperceptibly. Kazuya smoothed down the fur on his back in some attempt at comfort. His daemon hated doctors, despite this doctor, like anyone sensible, knowing and respecting the taboo around touching another person’s daemon (and If a patient’s daemon absolutely had to be examined, he would have his own daemon do it). Khayyam’s distaste came from empathy – he felt what Kazuya felt, though the sensations were dampened through their bond, and even the possibility of a shot was enough to make him hiss at the doctor. 

The doctor smiled at them. Kazuya didn’t return it. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your daemon settled into shape by the next time I saw you.” He said in a measured, aged voice. “It takes some time for children to start taking it seriously, but once they do the change is quite fast. It’s nothing to worry about.” He said again. His daemon watched curiously from atop file cabinet as they leave. 

Khayyam swoops overhead as a starling alongside Charis on the walk home. The mourning dove flew slow and steady, stopping often on trees and fences so as not to outpace his mother by more than a few yards and not outfly Khayyam’s young, unsteady wings. His daemon’s joy at flying resonated through their bond as an unburdened excitement that clashed with the new worries staining Kazuya’s mind like ink on linen. 

Plenty of kids his age had unsettled daemons – none he knew in person, but he’d seen them around town and on TV. It could take awhile for concrete self-identity to solidify, and it varied by country and culture. Khayyam did stand out for how many forms he would take, switching from mammal to reptile to bug and even to mythological shapes with no clear preference, but there had to be others who had such daemons too. He would settle eventually. He had to. It happened to everyone. 

Khayyam and Charis are waiting on the gate when their humans reach the house. Kazuya’s daemon basked on the crumbling stones as an anole, soaking in the dying heat of the day. He looked askance at them with a dark, beady eye. “I don’t know why you had to ask him. That doctor doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.” 

That earned them both a lecture on watching their language, even though Kazuya had asked Khayyam before not to curse in front of his mother.

In the closing days of summer, any concern Kazuya had about Khayyam fell to the wayside, replaced by computer games, playing with his dog, and avoiding neighborhood bullies. Khayyam continued to take whatever form he pleased, and Kazuya noticed it about as much as he noticed his own breathing. 

\----

But school started again, tearing away the veneer of normalcy Kazuya enjoyed the past few months. Khayyam went from one of ten un-settled in homeroom class to one of five, to one of two, in rapid succession. By the time Kazuya was 16, his was the only unsettled daemon in the grade. 

Kazuya asked Khayyam again one late afternoon why he hadn’t settled yet. A teacher had reprimanded him earlier that day about Khayyam changing shape in class, and the words still stung. He used to hope for a specific kind of daemon, one small and useful, but at that point he would have been happy with whatever form Khayyam eventually took. 

They sat on a park bench as the sun dipped below the horizon. A stray calico lived nearby, and Kazuya had brought some fish for it in the hopes it chose to appear. His daemon, curled beside him as a civet, tilted his head at the question like it was a mouse or a bug. “I don’t know,” he said. “I tried to stay the same, once, but it hurt. I just can’t yet. It doesn’t feel right.” 

Kazuya wasn’t satisfied with that, not really, but he didn’t want to force Khayyam to be something he wasn’t. He pet his daemon behind the ears, and Khayyam closed his eyes and trilled in happiness.

Kazuya didn’t loose friends, as he didn’t have any to begin with. But he was transformed, from an unremarkable, overlooked presence to one intrusively different, a freak, and he quickly learned that that was a far worse thing to be. Stares fell to whispers fell to insults and shoves between classes and outside of school. 

The worst came from Ozawa, another boy in his class. He always pushed the boundaries of Kazuya’s torment, goading others through his own focused punches, shoves, and barbed insults to be just as bad as him, if not worse. He seemed to take it as a personal challenge, testing how far he could take the harassment before being caught and halfheartedly told to stop. 

He tried to tell teachers, but never got more than suggestions that maybe this wouldn’t keep happening if Khayyam didn’t insist on changing so much.

Bruised skin could be hidden under a shirt, bloodied lips and scrapes could be washed and given ice, but a daemon’s state could not be hidden away so easily. Khayyam in particular was unusually eloquent for a daemon, as he spoke in Kazuya’s stead when Kazuya didn’t feel up to talking, and he did not like daily unavoidable pain, no matter how much it was dampened through their bond. 

He begged Khayyam not to say anything to his mother. She worked long hours, and more often that not came home late and tired, to the point that Charis often drifted off to sleep beside her while she finally ate dinner. She didn’t need anything else to worry about. He was barely his keeping his grades up as it was, efforts that he’d had to redouble since he’d started sleeping less, and he needed Khayyam to help maintain illusion. As long as his daemon was left alone, he could bear it, would have to bear it. 

His daemon yielded to what Kazuya asked of him and didn’t say anything, but took it a step further and shuttered completely, ceasing to speak even to Kazuya. While the frequency of his changes didn’t alter, the forms he took did – they were conspicuously more aggressive and carnivorous, and he began preemptively growling or hissing at anyone he deemed too close to them, which earned offended looks from strangers and a few lectures about being rude.

\-----

What stuck in his memory the most, for months and years afterward, came in the winter of his first year in high school. Kazuya had been walking home after school, long shadows and burnt orange sunshine of late fall simultaneously burning his eyes and chilling him to the bone. Khayyam was perched on his shoulder as a field mouse, half bundled up in Kazuya’s white scarf, fur tickling the side of his neck. 

He recognized the sound of footsteps too late to do anything – before he could run, someone slammed into his back and grabbed his arms, just as a long pair of jaws clamped down on his shin. Another set of steps followed, slower this time, alongside the telltale sound of hooves on concrete. 

Ozawa. He’d lost the ability to sneak up on people since his daemon had settled into a long tusked razorback boar, and so usually sent others ahead of him, like the classmate twisting Kazuya’s arms alongside the growling German Shepard daemon. Kazuya stilled like a rabbit in headlights as Ozawa strolled into his field of view, massive boar at his heels. Maybe if he were still enough, he thought, Ozawa wouldn’t think he was worth the trouble, just this once – until he snatched Khayyam from his shoulder and his mind stopped dead.

Ozawa’s mouth moved, and the one holding Kazuya said something else, his breath hot against Kazuya’s ear, but he couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see anything except Khayyam’s fragile body in Ozawa’s fist, thrashing around in panic. Pain seared along Kazuya’s ribs as the air was crushed from his lungs, replaced by acidic, unspeakable terror at Khayyam being away, far away, within arms reach but too far away. He didn’t realize he was struggling until he heard his pant leg tear in the daemon’s jaws and felt damp heat and saliva as it readjusted its grip. 

Ozawa looked down at Kazuya, smiled, and moved back a step. 

It wasn’t nearly far enough to endanger their bond, but it hurt, worse than his twisted arm and the teeth in his leg, like barbed hooks just starting to pierce his soul. Khayyam squeaked out and changed, body twisting and lengthening into a red, gold, and black banded snake. He sank his fangs into Ozawa’s fist, and he let go with a shouted curse. 

Kazuya tore away from the one holding his arms in a burst of strength. He met no resistance; the other boy was stuck staring at Ozawa’s hand. The petrification had spread to Ozawa, and he didn’t reach for Khayyam as he slithered away. Kazuya gathered his daemon in his arms and sprinted away. His daemon had taken the form of a king snake, not a coral snake, but he used Ozawa’s hesitation to get a head start.

He slammed the front door behind him as soon as he got home, his rattling breaths and pounding heartbeat nearly deafening in the silence. He meant to go to the bathroom to inspect the bite from the daemon and bandage it before his mother came home, but he slid to the floor, clinging to his daemon as his daemon clung to him. They both shook. Pascal, startled awake by the sudden noise, rushed over to Kazuya’s side and whined at his distress, trying to lick at his face and hands to alleviate whatever was wrong. 

Khayyam still didn’t speak to him, but the forced separation, brief as it was, haunted them both. He stayed within immediate arms reach when he wasn’t literally in Kazuya’s arms for weeks afterward, even when they slept. 

It felt like he could breathe again, just a bit, when Ozawa dropped out of school altogether. 

\----

The longer Khayyam went without settling, the more Kazuya was told, by teachers, relatives, doctors, even strangers, that he needed to sort out whatever the problem was before it impacted his future. How could anyone be expected to hire him if he was so indecisive? How would he get accepted into university, or find a wife? People couldn’t trust someone who didn’t know who they were. 

He never replied, as he knew he wasn’t meant to. He stayed silent, looking to the ground or away, holding or at least touching his silently furious daemon in whatever form he was taking at the moment. 

Likewise, the same people who told Kazuya that his daemon needed to settle often gave their own theories, unprompted, for why Khayyam was the way he was. He’d heard Khayyam’s nature blamed on his mother being around too much, or not being around enough, on what his father must have done, or what he must not have done, on him, because he treated Khayyam too strictly, or not strictly enough, on technology, somehow, and on modern life, because that’s just what children were like these days, disobedient and undedicated. 

He stayed silent and weathered the storm brewing in their bond, wondering which of them the roiling undercurrent of shame-frustration-exhaustion originated from. 

\----

It all exploded on an otherwise unremarkable day. Kazuya was puzzling over returned history homework between classes while their teacher was out, worrying the edge of the sheet as he stared over the sea of red marks. Khayyam was hiding in the recesses of his desk. He wished he and his daemon were on speaking terms so he could ask him about the worksheet. Khayyam rarely knew the answers when Kazuya didn’t, but company would have been worth more than clarity. 

One of Ozawa’s old hangers-on passed his desk, stopping to knock into it as he went and laughing when Kazuya flinched. His daemon, a long tailed primate on his shoulder, laughed too. Normal. Kazuya balled his fists and choked down anger that burned his throat like bile. Also normal.

This time, however, Kazuya’s desk rattled again of its own volition, and a blur exploded out of it towards the classmate that passed by. Khayyam’s wings spread and sharpened, his form solidifying into a small grey bird, just before he sunk his talons into the primate daemon’s back and dragged them both shrieking to the floor. 

The other boy bellowed in surprise and lunged to the writhing ball of feathers and fur. Phantom agony flaring along his ribs, Kazuya moved without thinking and blocked his way. When the boy shoved and hit him, he hit back.

The screams of their daemons, the shouting of the other students, the crash of a desk toppling over, and the blood roaring in his ears all blurred into muted white noise as Kazuya tried to avoid being hit and stop his classmate from reaching Khayyam. His opponent was small, no bigger than Kazuya, and wasn’t used to fighting one person alone. For a fleeting moment Kazuya thought he might be alright, until a sharp blow to the side of his head and a flailing arm slamming into his gut said otherwise. A coppery taste flooded his tongue and distant stings flared across his arms and face, secondhand perception of whatever was being done to his daemon. 

Someone gripped his shirt collar and yanked him away, hard. The teacher. His daemon, a growling brown and white Akita dog, corralled the other boy, who glared at Kazuya, one of his eyes starting to swell. His daemon scurried over and leapt into his arms. Patches of dark fur had been torn from its back and tail. 

They march Kazuya to the principal’s office, the teacher on his left and the dog daemon on his right, between him and Khayyam. His daemon, for all that he’d been roughed up, looked the brightest Kazuya had seen him in months. The tail of his tabby cat form was held high, and his green eyes shone as if he were being escorted for a job well done, not on his way to be disciplined. 

Once they were in the office, seated before an empty desk as the principal and teacher spoke in the hallway, something like shame seemed to weigh down on the daemon. Khayyam leapt into Kazuya’s arms as a red fox, ears flat, and dragged a rough tongue over the still-bleeding cut on his forehead. He smoothed out the fur along his daemon’s back, letting the softness under his hands ease the encroaching realization of what he’d just done. 

Khayyam stared up at him, contrite and apologetic, amber eyes searching for any more injuries. Kazuya pulled him into a loose hug and tried to impart month’s worth of apologies through the contact.

They call in his mother. She sits rigid beside him in front of the principle as he tells her what happened, while Kazuya gripped the fabric of his pant leg and looked at the floor. He risked a glance at her, once, and saw the frown and deepened worry lines he’d been trying to prevent for so long. Khayyam, a small tree shrew, was frozen against him. Charis, perched on the back of his mother’s chair had looked between him and his mother with tiny worried flicks of his head, like he was barely holding back from flying over to try to straighten Kazuya’s hair or preen Khayyam’s fur, things he did when Kazuya was upset as a child. 

The principal, with folded hands and in a dull monotone, took it remarkably well, only suspending Kazuya for a day. He tells his mother that he expected something like this to happen sooner or later – teenagers with unsettled daemons were notoriously volatile, especially ones Kazuya’s age. It tended to be worse with an absent father in the mix. Had she considered taking him to see a specialist?

They go home once the meeting ends. A tense, impenetrable silence set in around and between he and his mother as soon as they’re dismissed, and didn’t evaporate on the walk home or upon reaching the house. He couldn’t read whether she was upset or not, and past that was too tired to even attempt it.

He limped to his room and closed the door behind him. Khayyam, close on his heels, dashed under the desk, an indecipherable blur of dark scales. 

Kazuya meant to turn on the computer, but he just sat in the chair and stared at his smudged reflection on the blank monitor. Faint voices leaked through the floorboards as his mother spoke quietly with her daemon downstairs. His throat burned. 

There was a tug on his torn pant cuff as Khayyam ran up his leg, across his back, and settled around his shoulders. His vision swam too much to see what animal his daemon had become in the monitor reflection.

A smooth tail curls protectively around Kazuya’s neck, “There’s nothing wrong with us.” Khayyam whispered. 

A small, cold nose pressed into his cheek. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” Khayyam swore.

And Kazuya wanted to believe it.

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't very good and I don't like the pacing, it's more me musing about bullying than anything. 
> 
> I talk more about smt/daemon stuff on my tumblr, feel free to check it out: ancestrallizard.tumblr.com


End file.
